3800 Hours Later, Man Builds Functional WALL-E Robot

It’s not every day you see a functioning robot from a CG animated film come to life. Yet, this is precisely what hobbyist robot builder Mike Senna did with the iconic WALL-E droid from Pixar’s critically-acclaimed film of the same name.

According to an interview by The Yo Show, Senna started the project in 2010 and spent an average of 25 hours a week on it, funded completely from his own pocket. In total, Senna believes somewhere between 3200-3800 man-hours went into his remote-controlled WALL-E.

Not only is the attention to detail in the paint job amazing, but the effort that went into making it move, from the working tracks and waving arms, to its turning head and “eyebrows”, Senna thought of just about everything:

To take it from the screen and put it into a real world object… it’s a very long process. You watch a particular part of the movie over and over again, it’s really stressful because somebody can build something perfectly, but if you don’t weather the thing or give it the paint job it’s supposed to have, then you totally blow it.

Senna has a blog, where you can check out high resolution photos of the WALL-E replica, and his YouTube channel features a couple of videos of the robot during various stages of its construction.

[The Yo Show]

Video: Yahoo
Image: Mike Senna